Page 53 of Forget Me Not

The car is stuffed with a smothered silence, my mom staring out the passenger window as a blur of small towns breeze sleepily past.

“It’s just up there,” she says at last, pointing to a stream up ahead.

I flip on the turn signal, a courtesy for no one as we curve down a narrow roadway. Gravel dust erupting like smoke from the tires as a decrepit old barn slumps in the distance, four wooden walls stripped down to the bones.

“Welcome to the Farm.”

I look at my mother, her voice wilted into a whisper as we come to a stop before the structure, field grass scratching the glass like nails.

Then I turn off the car, staring silently at the barn up ahead.

Four decades of desertion has made it appear as though it’s one wind gust away from crumbling completely but I force myself to slide out, my mother still sitting in the seat beside me as I slam the door shut and make my way closer, coming to stop at the mouth of the entrance.

I peer inside, the barn’s hot breath musky and damp as I imagine Lily meeting Marcia in this very same spot, a cigarette balanced between her two fingers as she walked her around on some strange tour.

I step inside slowly, taking it in. There are relics of squatters scattered around: an old sleeping bag slouched in the corner and a smashed vodka bottle glinting on the floor.

Then a ripple of movement catches my attention and I twist to the side, a strip of pink fabric quivering in the breeze.

It’s nailed to the wall, just above a window with the glass punched out, and I squint as I turn in a slow circle, eyeing the remnants of a paperback bloated with water.

A rogue table leg snapped clean like a femur and the edge of a picture frame, a dull, dirty gold.

I let my hands trail the walls as I walk the perimeter, reading all the words written in paint, graffiti carved with the sharp tip of a knife—and then I come across an etching so old it’s barely visible, though my fingers recognize the sentence from all the times they’d felt it before.

Lily was here.

“It looks different,” my mom says, and I whip around at the sound of her voice, her silhouette standing still in the entrance. “But at the same time, exactly the same.”

I stay rigid before her, taking in the faint whispers of a life lived in this place before I turn back around, my gaze trained on those words still preserved in the wood.

“She never belonged here,” my mom continues. “Katherine, I mean.”

I feel her come to a stop beside me as my mind starts to sort through everything I’ve learned about Katherine, a freshman from Berkeley who just disappeared.

“She was smart,” she continues. “Had a real future. And it was an escape for her, too, I think—from the pressures of school, a few months of distraction—but unlike the rest of us, she had something to go back to.”

I drop my hand, thinking of her picture I found in the paper.

Lean body resting against the edge of the camper before meeting a man the same way as the others, a man who said all the things she had wanted to hear.

Who persuaded her to bring him along for the summer, the two of them weaving their way across the country before settling down on the opposite coast.

“But Mitchell wouldn’t let her,” I say, surprised to find my mother shaking her head.

“ Lily wouldn’t let her.”

I stare down at her name again, thinking about Lily growing up in the system.

The dozens of families she must have known and all of them abandoning her the moment she started to settle.

Going about their lives, forgetting her completely.

Shuttling her around from place to place until she finally arrived at the Farm and desperately tried to make it feel like a home.

“The summer was over,” my mom says. “Katherine needed to get back to school but Lily kept talking about how worried she was that Mitchell would go with her.”

I find myself nodding, that familiar fear of being forgotten rearing up its hideous head.

“Though, honestly, I don’t think he actually would have left,” she adds. “Katherine’s camper, it was the only way we had of getting around. He didn’t want to lose that, so he was just saying what he knew Lily needed to hear. She was nothing more than a tool in his hands.”

“So, what happened?” I ask. “What did she do?”

My mom sighs, the movement so strong her body seems to deflate.

“The night before Katherine was supposed to leave, we were all together, around the fire, and Lily brought her something to drink.” Her voice takes on some faraway tone, a placid detachment as she stares straight ahead.

“She didn’t even ask what it was because we did that all the time out here.

Mitchell used to grow things, sell things. ”

I twist around, staring out at the field behind us as I imagine that steady stream of cars coming and going, Mitchell easing his way onto each seat and walking back out with crumpled bills in his hand.

Lily picking those flowers, tiny and toxic. Rolling the stems between her fingers like needles loaded with a lethal dose.

“And Katherine trusted her,” I say, thinking about how Lily had persuaded Natalie to drink something, too, all because they were threatening to break the fragile life she’d created. The home Lily had finally built for herself.

“She got so pale.” My mom nods, her voice barely audible as she relives it all. “She couldn’t move. Then she tried to start talking but she wasn’t making any sense.”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath, the tears streaming out faster than she can wipe them away.

“I remember saying we needed to get her to a hospital but Mitchell said she’d be fine, that she just needed to sleep it off. When I woke up the next morning, Katherine was gone, but her car was still there.”

She turns toward me now, her skin splotchy and damp, and I watch as she wipes her fingers under her eyes, two black crescents smudging onto her cheeks before her gaze lifts to the sky.

“There was this mound of dirt beneath one of the trees like a hole had been dug and filled back in, and that’s when I knew,” she says. “I knew what they did and I knew I had to leave, too.”

“How did you do it?” I ask, taking a step closer as I imagine the first day Marcia showed up, my mom lying in the grass outside this same barn. Smiling vaguely, keeping her distance. Biding her time as she planned her next move. “How did you leave?”

“We used to go into town for supplies,” she says. “None of us had any money so we stole what we needed. Then one day, when we were close to home, I slipped out the back door of one of the houses.”

I chew on my cheek, trying to envision my own mother climbing through windows or jimmying front doors. Fingers flipping through closets until she looked around and finally found herself alone.

“I ran back to your father,” she adds, drawing my attention back to her. “Of course, he took me right back. He was always too good for me.”

“What did he say when you showed up?”

“Nothing,” she says. “He was just happy I was okay, then a few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.”

She looks at me, finally, eyes red and wet and begging for forgiveness.

“I knew it wasn’t his,” she says, and I bow my head, my own eyes drilling into a spot on the floor, because even though Liam told me already, hearing it straight from my mother’s lips feels like I’m learning it all over again.

“And honestly, I think he did, too, but he was never going to make me face it alone. So, he proposed. Bought us a house. Did all the things you were supposed to do back then.”

I think back to the bar, my father’s voice on the phone. That desperate desire to keep taking care of my mother even after two decades of being apart.

“I’m so sorry,” she says as I remember him asking me to keep our call to myself, that small kindness muddled with shame like he didn’t want her to know how much he still cared. “I never wanted you or Natalie to know.”

“But I thought she was the one who told him,” I say, bunching my brows as I attempt to work it all out. “I thought that was the whole reason why he left.”

“She did.” My mom nods. “It was. But once Natalie knew, once it was out in the open like that, I think it just became a lot harder for him to pretend.”

I fall silent, my mother’s dysfunction finally making more sense as I think of how she never wants to accept any help, eternally burdened with the guilt of what she had done.

How she still keeps my dad’s picture hanging up on the wall, beholden to the man who gave her another chance—a chance she knew she didn’t deserve.

“He loved your sister like she was his own,” she says to me now, reaching out to grab my hand, fingers warm as they weave through mine. “Him leaving, it was never about her, but he spent eighteen years staring straight into the face of my lie. It was time he moved on from that.”

“So, you knew all along,” I say, thinking about how Eric DiNello showed up the morning Natalie vanished, looked my mother square in the eye.

You know how girls can be.

“When Natalie went missing,” I continue, realizing that moment between them held so much more weight than I ever could have known.

That his words were never meant to be a comfort, an encouragement that her daughter would turn up all right; instead, they were an intimidation, a threat.

A warning to stay silent about all the things that she knew.

“You knew there was more to the story than what he was saying.”

“Not exactly,” she says. “All the evidence pointed to Jeffrey. I couldn’t prove anything other than that. Besides, I had another daughter I had to protect.”

I look down at our hands, our slack clasp, and feel my squeeze tighten as I think about all the things my mother has done. The lies she’s told and the secrets she’s kept, all of it an attempt to take care of her daughters.

To give us a better, safer life.

“They found me,” she continues. “A few months after I left, I came home and I could tell Lily had been there.”

I look up at her again, imagining a chewed-up core dropped in the sink. A picture missing from the face of the fridge and those phantom words reemerging on the mirror as soon as the room filled up with steam.

“It was like she was tapping on my shoulder,” she says. “Always reminding me that they were there, what they were capable of.”

I stare at my mother, trying to process the weight of her secrets. The fear she’s been carrying for twenty-two years keeping her cornered, holding her down.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I ask at last. “Why did you keep it all to yourself?”

“Because you were a child,” she says. “Then you grew up and left and never came back. I love you, Claire, but it always felt like you were safer when you weren’t here.”

I stare at my mother, realizing, now, that in the same way Natalie pushed me away in an attempt to protect me, my mother has been keeping me at a distance to help me stay safe.

“I wrote you a letter,” she says, a stitch in my chest when I remember what Ryan had said a few days ago, flipping through my mail to find my mom’s name.

“After you left, I realized I was going to lose you for good if we couldn’t start being honest with each other.

So, I tried,” she says, dropping her gaze to the ground.

“The best I could, at least, to get all these things out that I never knew how to say out loud.”

I nod, tears filling my eyes as I glance down at our hands.

“I just need a minute,” I say, pulling back as she smiles softly.

Then I let myself take one last look around before making my way toward the barn doors.

It’s midday now, the summer sun singeing the nape of my neck, and I pull out my phone, snapping a few pictures of the barn, the brook.

The weeds and wildflowers and sweetgum sprouting its spiny gumballs, a drowsy willow weeping at the edge of it all.

I walk back to the car, sliding inside. A blank stare as I peer through the windshield. Then I twist around, eyeing my bags I had grabbed from the guesthouse floor.

My brown briefcase slumped on the seat, the maroon spine of the diary peeking out of the pocket.

I reach out and grab it, draping the book across my lap.

I have five pages left, and while I’m going to turn it in, its contents corroborating all the evidence I’ve collected, giving credence to the things I know Liam will say, right now, I can feel the temptation to finally learn how it ends vibrating my bones like a rattling wire.

I crack the spine and stare down at the words, that familiar blue script faded and worn as the ink starts to run dry. Then I take a deep breath and lean back in my seat, allowing myself to live the last moments of Marcia Rayburn’s fleeting life.